Raw
Raw (2016) - dir. by Julia Ducournau
Raw is a voracious, gory, electric horror film, its narrative concentrated on a young, first-year student, Justine, at veterinary school in France, which her sister also attends. Justine's lifelong vegetarianism is completely upended when, one morning, she is forced to participate in a hazing ritual, in which she must eat raw rabbit kidneys. After this gruesome event, Justine notices the development of strange rashes all over her body, and starts to experience constant cravings for raw meat, and she eats large amounts of raw animal meat in order to curb her appetite, but none of it satiates her. One night, her sister helps Justine wax her bikini line, and chops off the wax with scissors, when Justine writhes around and suddenly, her sister's finger is cut off. After her sisters passes out from the blood-loss, Justine inspects the finger for an uneasy moment before beginning to devour it, with a bloodied, gasping mouth and a mixture of self-repulsion and pleasure. Her sister later forces Justine to drive with her somewhere, where the sister runs over two pedestrians, who she then begins to eat. Justine refuses to participate, but cannot defy her cannibalistic cravings for much longer. After a while, she has sex with her male roommate, Adrien, and during intercourse, she starts to hunger for his flesh, but controls herself, instead biting into her own arm, unnerving Adrien immensely. A series of such violences occur, biting off boys' lips and attempting to eat corpses, which is recorded by her classmates. She and her sister engage in a violent, gory fight, trying to bite and devour one another. Near the end of the film, her sister murders and eats parts of Adrien, and Justine takes care of her, cleaning it up, giving in to their shared nature. In the end of the film, Justine's sister is convicted of the murder, and Justine's father reveals that the cannibalism is a genetic trait, showing her his scars and missing flesh, inflicted by Justine's mother.
Birthplace(s) of Monstrosity
Gender and hunger meld together to ignite a highly nuanced birthplace of monstrosity here. If monstrosity is a birthable element, then indeed by ontology monstrosity is connected to the maternal, matrilinear, the essentialist construct of the feminine. To expand Creed's Freudian analyses of the mother-figure, however, I'd like to think about the "birth" of monstrosity as more of an invention, regeneration, accessible through different experiences of gender and regardless of anatomy. Troubling the notions of sex and gender that govern the whole construction of the monstrous-feminine is especially necessary in Raw, for the birth is self-made, here, and is not reliant on anatomy but on inherited hunger. Non-normative gender identity, particularly the experiences of trans and nonbinary gender identity, pries open the monstrous-feminine as inhabitable not only by cisgender individuals; indeed, femininity reveals itself as a social construct, malleable and indefinite, in Raw's monster-ifying of it.
Visible and Invisible Monsters
Raw engages with the notion of obliterative hunger as idiosyncrantic to femininity, and its unique capacity for monstrosity. The fear of women's hunger, uninhibited and all-consuming, completely ungovernable by patriarchy, clings to contemporary society even now. The cultural fear of the "disordered" woman, the fear and institutionalized hatred of unruly bodies, of excess and expulsion, disability and blood, femininity as grotesque and vile, haunts contemporary wellness culture and gendered rhetoric. Raw is a bildungsroman built from blood and hunger, sticky and pungent. The sheer nauseating power of the gore, of the consumption of substances that would usually be immediately expelled, rejected, by the body, is a most visceral, full-body confrontation with the abject. To witness this film is to willingly indulge in disgust, in revulsion and nausea, and thus monstrosity seems to be self-inserted, chosen, entertainment.
Of cannibalism, Kristeva theorizes, "I give up cannibalism because abjection (of the mother) leads me toward respect for the body of the other, my fellow man, my brother" (Kristeva 79). Justine cannot give up cannibalism; she actually grows into it rather than out of it. The cultural disappearing of women's—and non-normative, gender-variant—bodies functions to deplete individuals of their sense of self, thus creating ghosts, empty and cyclical. No respect for the wholeness and autonomy of the body is offered. Justine's character challenges any acceptance of such a structural dissociation. Monstrosity surfaces in Justine because of her refusal to be led toward that "respect" for the body of the other; the other, then, in all its terror and intrusions, is not assimilated, not acknowledged as legitimate, but devoured. Kristeva describes such a desire as the "need for impure nourishment." Justine's burgeoning sexuality and hunger arrive at the same time—her cultural worth, still, relies on archaic shapes of womanhood, on her sexual "purity" and self-limitations. Shrinking becomes the culturally acceptable response to the abject, as a means to confine the monstrous supposedly inherent to womanhood, but Justine does the opposite. She consumes, she expands. Her desire has malformed into literal cannibalism, but this appears to be an ingrowth of a monstrous culture demanding that her hunger, her desire, be shelved and annihiliated.
Radically, the ending of the film challenges the power balances and exchanges assumed within patriarchy. While women are conditioned and taught to withhold their monstrousness—monstrousness defined as that which seems abject in women, as "impure hunger" and disordered femininity—Justine's father reveals that he actually accepts, even welcomes, his wife's monstrosity. He nourishes his wife's cravings, providing his own flesh as the abject source. The negotiations of love and gender here subvert easy roles of victim and perpetrator; complicity becomes an act of subversion, the monstrous-feminine becomes acceptable if contained, but not tamed, not starved.
